Edition 19: Short and Sweet

Oct 8, 2019

Almost at Edition 20. Short and sweet on this one because I have a discovery call in 1 hour & 3 proposals that I need to ship this week. Which also explains why there was none of this last week.

This will be super short and sweet because I want to keep the momentum going. I don’t send one this week and this newsletter will fade into the abyss.

In personal news, I’ve made some progress getting some extra help & its been incredible and I wish I had done it sooner.

Hiten Shah @hnshah

Marketers... yes you 🤓 What are you using to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing? Bonus: What do you wish you could measure about your online marketing efforts that you can’t currently?

Hiten regularly posts open ended questions like this. I am not sure why or what market research he’s trying to do or if its just to get interesting responses but it’s been quite the trove of info when going through the replies.

Speaking of measurement. Hubspot & GA released Attribution Tools this week it seems like:

Have you tried them out? Let me know!

Merci Victoria Grace @merci

I've been thinking a lot about the importance of GTM. Here's a clear example of what a growth ramp looks like when you own the distribution channel (MSFT) versus when you acquire every user for the first time (WORK), even when you do an historically good job at it.

Merci is an incredible person to follow - she went from Operator (slack) to VC and her insights are incredible. Microsoft OWNS the market & its like the browser wars back in the day. They can just release a new product (free/add-on) to the MS Office Stack and boom they see adoption. MS isn’t sexy to talk about like Slack but Satya has done an incredible turn around of the company.

Web Smith @web

Thought: “own the distribution" is the most universally applicable advice for this digital era. 1/ Retailers: own key brands 2/ Media: own the conversions 3/ Writers: own your distribution 4/ Musicians: own your masters 5/ Brands: own the conversation

This reminded me of Zynga and other companies who built an audience (publishers?) on Facebook’s Open Graph/Newsfeed but didn’t build a direct relationship with their audience (hello email newsletters) and couldn’t keep up with the changing algorithms.

Amanda Orson @amandaorson

Seeing more and more "$1/mo" maintenance-only downsells on consumer or SMB-targeted SaaS products. Do you think that improves LTV or just a "retained customer" # vanity metric?

My take? Vanity metrics to reduce churn #. Maintenance down sells are something I' am exploring with my agency but I am not a 100% convinced it makes a ton of sense. If you are a PPC agency - maintaining an ad account is different then setting one up. But as an Ops/Demand agency there’s always things to get ones hands dirty in.

Andy Johns @ibringtraffic

I continue to meet founders and operators that overfit a "growth hacking" approach to scaling their startup. This mentality is widespread and insidious. Thankfully, we're at the early stages of the declining popularity in the growth hacking craze

Thank god Growth Hacking is fading as a fad. I don’t think I could live with myself if it didn’t. Even the folks who popularized the term and distancing themselves away from it.

Mike Volpe @mvolpe

Can someone explain to me how Marketo (which does not have a CRM) ranks better than Salesforce and HubSpot (both of which have a CRM) in the magic mushroom for “CRM Lead Management”???

Oh Marketo. There is a longer essay about Marketo / Marketing tools coming soon but this is why you should take all G2/Gartner reports with a grain of salt. Speaking of which TOPO got acquired by Gartner. I hope TOPO keeps it bar as high as before.